Using the Contact Duplicates Tool

With thousands of contacts in your donor database, it's very likely there will be duplicates every now and then. This article explains how to use Kindful's Contact Duplicates tool to sort out and merge duplicate contacts.

The Contact Duplicates tool will search for fields within contacts that are similar, isolating those as potential duplicates. Contact Duplicates can filter matches by contacts with the same name, same address, same email, same last name and zip, same phone number, or same organization name. You can also see all match types at once.

Choosing a match type

When you open Contact Duplicates, the page defaults to filtering by All Match Types. This means if any part of a contact (name, phone number, etc.) matches the same part of another contact, both will show up as a potential match.

By clicking the Filter by dropdown you can choose to filter through potential duplicates by other fields, such as name or phone number.

Merging a duplicate

When you've chosen a filter for a specific type of match, any potential duplicate pairs should be showing. You'll see the Primary Record on the left, and the Potential Duplicate on the right.

Outlined below are the base guidelines for how merges work.

Empty fields

If a field is empty on the primary record, but filled on the potential duplicate, then the data from the potential duplicate will be merged into the primary record. The inverse is also true.

Conflicting fields

If the same field is filled on both the primary record and the potential duplicate, the primary will overwrite the potential duplicate, and the information in the potential duplicate's field will be lost. If you wish to retain the data from the duplicate, you will need to manually copy and move the conflicting data. Except for the oldest join date, which will always be retained.

Transaction data

All transaction data and activity from the potential duplicate will be merged into the primary record. This will update the contact's activities trail as well as year and lifetime totals.

If you'd like to see what the merge of two contacts will look like, you can use the Preview button to see what would be merged or overwritten. You can also switch positions of the primary record and the potential duplicate by selecting Switch. When you're ready to process the merge, you can select Merge on the right, or declare that pair Not Duplicates.

Note: merging cannot be undone. Please carefully examine the information for both the primary record and potential duplicate, as you may be subject to losing information from the potential duplicate if the primary record has conflicting data.

Examples

Refer to the table below for examples of what empty or conflicting fields would look like when they're merged.

Primary Record

Potential Duplicate

Resulting Merge

Example 1

First nameLuke

First nameMark

First nameLuke

Example 2

First nameLuke

First name(Blank)

First nameLuke

Example 3

First name(Blank)

First nameMark

First nameMark

Example 4

Transaction$10 July 4th

Transaction$10 July 4th

Transactions$10 July 4th$10 July 4th

FAQ

Does an import kick off a refresh of the Duplicate Finder?Yes, for each person associated with the import, whether its a Kindful services import or with the self-import tool, Kindful will look for duplicates.

What kinds of actions in the app kick off a duplicate finder refresh?In general, any "one-off" action which creates or updates a contact will queue up a worker to look for duplicates. Certain bulk actions may not.

How long is it expected to take the duplicate finder to run in entirety?This is a hard question to answer. It can vary widely based upon the number of contacts in the import, the number of contacts in the account, and other activity going on in the system. We do not have any hard numbers on this, but it is safe to assume that each contact will take a couple of seconds to process.

For a customer who has around 8,000 contacts, how long would it take to find duplicates?With the assumption above, if an import of 8,000 contacts was queued up, it could easily take 3-4 hours to work through them all. It is a very load-heavy operation to sweep an account's entire database for contacts with matching fields.